Comic-Con: Gondry Talks Green Hornet

Sony may wish that its superhero movie The Green Hornet was The Green Lantern instead. The contrast couldn't be greater. While one seems resolutely off-key and indie--after all, Michel Gondry is directing Seth Rogen--the other is straight-ahead super-hero material. Which one am I more interested in seeing? Well, I'll go for the Gondry movie, as long as it's the way he wants it to be. But clearly--as articulated in my flip cam interview below--the director is working hand-in-glove with Sony, the studio that is paying for the movie. He says he's listening to their notes every week. And he's going along with retro 3-D formatting. While I respect both Sony and Gondry's technical expertise, post-3-D never looks as good as shooting it that way in the first place.

Which reminds me of Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. There was always something off-kilter about that film, which finally made it more interesting than most. And to Warners' credit, the studio did everything it could to turn it into the best version of what it could be, which was never the mainstream family film they originally greenlit. Hiring an indie visionary can yield a commercial picture--or not. Let's hope that Green Hornet ends up as much its director's film as Where the Wild Things Are, even if it doesn't make a b.o. killing. While Sony figured that they had to include this movie in their Comic-Con dog-and-pony show, it didn't exactly blow the roof off of Hall H.

Rogen seemed oddly defensive at the press conference. I wonder about him as a leading man. (Here's my Daily Beast profile.) He can be funny and likable. But audiences resisted him in the mismarketed Zack and Miri Make a Porno (which I loved), Observe and Report, and Funny People. He worked well as a voice actor in Monsters & Aliens and seems well-cast as another alien in Simon Pegg's upcoming Working Title comedy Paul, which was well-received at The Con (more on that to come). Here's Movieline's interview with Green Hornet writer--and frequent Rogen collaborator--Evan Goldberg.